Talk:Nidalee/@comment-4888212-20131120234909/@comment-8506165-20131125063059
Well on the subject of quantifying "anti-fun" there was an extensive thread on the LoL forums a while back in which one of the designers (Zileas) talked about general anti-patterns they try and avoid in the game and one of them was "fun vs anti-fun". "'''Fun Fails to Exceed Anti-Fun' Anti-fun is the negative experience your opponents feel when you do something that prevents them from 'playing their game' or doing activities they consider fun. While everything useful you can do as a player is likely to cause SOME anti-fun in your opponents, it only becomes a design issue when the 'anti-fun' created on your use of a mechanic is greater than your fun in using the mechanic. Dark Binding is VERY favorable on this measurement, because opponents get clutch dodges just like you get clutch hits, so it might actually create fun on both sides, instead of fun on one and weak anti-fun on another. On the other hand, a strong mana burn is NOT desirable -- if you drain someone to 0 you feel kinda good, and they feel TERRIBLE -- so the anti-fun is exceeded by the fun. This is important because the goal of the game is for players to have fun, so designers should seek abilities that result in a net increase of fun in the game. Basic design theory, yes?"'' Essentially if a champion is creating more frustration for the enemy player than satisfaction for the person playing them, when both players are playing right, then they have mechanics that are in some way "anti-fun". Yorick is a good example of this (which is why he's got a rework planned): it's very frustrating to play against him, constantly taking ghoul harass while he heals up any damage you do to him in return, whereas for the person playing Yorick... it's not actually tremendously fun. Oh sure, they get something out of the fact they're winning their lane, but really they're just pressing buttons while the ghouls do all the work for most of laning. It doesn't compare to the satisfaction a player gets out of pulling off some slick moves with Zed resulting in a kill with the splat from the ultimate, for instance. Obviously, this is somewhat subjective, but you can roughly see the point here. The strength of mechanics isn't necessarily relevant - Fids' ult is tremendously powerful used properly, for instance, but it doesn't defy the paradigm because you have the fun Fids gets from landing the ult well (balancing the anti-fun of getting hit by a Fids ult) but the satisfaction enemies can get from completely denying Fiddle his ult for the next 130 seconds with one well-timed bit of CC. But if an ability or moveset is too strong (say someone had a 10s stun even if it were avoidable) then it obviously fails to meet this pattern purely because of the huge amount of anti-fun it can potentially create. So yes, it's hard to measure in any truly objective sense, but it's obvious some champions break this pattern more than others.